A Forensic Pathology Investigation of Dismembered Domestic Cats: Coyotes or Cults?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dismembered cats ( Felis catus) have been found in North American schoolyards, parks, walkways, or lawns and sometimes result in local media attention. When a member of the public encounters these cats, they commonly report finding either the cranial or caudal half of a cat in a prominent location. Such findings cause public consternation and pose difficulties to investigators in identifying whether animal abuse has occurred and whether to concentrate resources on the investigation. This report describes necropsy results from 53 cats involved in such instances in the cities of Edmonton and St. Albert, Canada, from 2007 to 2016. We evaluated these results in relation to 2 hypotheses: that the dismembered cats were the result of human activity, or predation and scavenging by coyotes ( Canis latrans). The main postmortem features were canine tooth wounds in the neck accompanied by tearing of the subcutaneous structures, skin avulsion, broken claws, and removal of internal organs with the colon and intestine attached to and trailing from the carcass. Based on the nature of the lesions, along with other circumstances of the deaths of the cats in this study, we concluded that these dismembered cat remains resulted from coyote predation on living cats and scavenging of the bodies of cats that died of other causes. We offer additional information to assist veterinarians, veterinary pathologists, and civic officials in identifying the probable cause of death for cat carcasses provided by members of the public.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".